John Lukacs latest brief book on the great personae of WWII begins from a simple but almost inarguable thesis, followed by a largely unsupported contention:

There was a fateful condition of the Second World War that not enough people comprehend even now. This is that the Anglo-American alliance, for all its tremendous material and financial and industrial and manpower superiority, could not have really conquered Hitler's Germany without Russia. That is why 22 June 1941 was the most important turning point of the Second World War.

To begin with, it seems relatively unlikely that Britain and America would have even fought Germany on the continent had Hitler not already had to deal with war on another front and had the Soviets remained his allies. But it certainly would have been more difficult, if not impossible, to defeat a Nazi Germany that had no threat at its back and could commit its full forces in the West. So, yes, we can safely say that the war between Stalin and Hitler was a necessary pre-condition of the complete military defeat of the Third Reich.

However, Mr. Lukacs simply accepts Winston Churchill's view that had the Nazis won their war with the Soviets they would have dominated Europe for some extended period of empire, while the Soviet empire that we helped establish was, on the other hand, always destined to be short-lived. Unfortunately, he never bothers to explain why this should have been the case, just asserts it as a given. And while he protests the tendency to lump Stalin and Hitler and Nazism and Bolshevism together, he never explains what exactly were the differences that would have made Nazism so much stronger in power that it would have succeeded so extravagantly where Communism failed. This leaves him free to beat his tiresome drum about how Churchill and FDR are heroes of history for taking down Hitler but Ronald Reagan was an idiot for not just letting the USSR die on the vine, but must be troublesome to any reader who isn't willing to take the Lukacs position on the basis of faith alone.

Still, the book is certainly worth reading for anyone interested in the mechanics of the odd Hitler/Stalin relationship. Mr. Lukacs does do a much better job of presenting the argument that Hitler knew he could lose to a combination of England, America and Russia, so sought first to knock out Britain in 1940, but, failing there, tried next to defeat the Soviets quickly. I'm personally inclined to doubt that Hitler's Germany was actually capable of defeating either England or Russia or of long administering all of the defeated peoples of Europe if they'd somehow managed. But we can certainly be glad it never came to that and it does make for fascinating reading to see what led Hitler into these wars. And, make no mistake, it was very much Hitler driving the action. As Mr. Lukacs presents Joseph Stalin he truly believed that he'd reached an accommodation with Hitler and refused to listen to warnings that Germany was preparing to attack. The more interesting, and perhaps more realistic, question than what might have happened had Hitler defeated Stalin is what might have happened had he ignored him. If, like Mr. Lukacs, you truly believe that Nazism was a functional system of governance that could enable Germany to rule over a vast empire of oppressed peoples then the Nazis might have extended their control until they dominated all of France and then Spain and Portugal while simultaneously spreading its tentacles out into the Near East, the rest of Africa, and on to India. That seems a mighty tall task for a nation of just 60 million people, but obviously no more so than ruling Europe from Iceland to the Bering Straits.

Comments:

Your review is spare prose as a book review ought to be. There is an important consideration or two not mentioned, so if I may?

It was clear to Churchill that Germany was the preeminent industrial nation in Europe and that Britain was no match. By securing the 'Axis' agreement with Musselini and the Anschluss with Austria, Germany became virtually impregnable. Sharing central Europe with Italy and the entire German-speaking Reich, Hitler could have very likely cemented control over Western Europe for a generation.

Hitler considered that Western Europe was secure for Germany without a British surrender because he believed the USA would not make war on him. The Japanese didn't confer with Berlin prior to the Pearl Harbor attack; the Germans were more surprised than Roosevelt. It was still uncertain that America would declare war on Germany even after Dec7th 1941; Hitler declared war on us before it became necessary for Roosevelt to take that question to Congress. And even then, Hitler did not foresee that 70% of the US war effort would be directed against him.

Given the (reasonable) assumptions the Hitler Gov't made, their attack on the Soviet Union was also reasonable. They would have secured oil supplies and the wheat fields of the Ukraine while pinning the Red Army on the eastern side of the Urals.

Possibly you'd have pointed this stuff out in a more complete statement. But it seemed from the cursory treatment in your review that you were over-estimating the Anglo-American strength, under-estimating, first, German power in 1939 and second, Soviet power in 1945. This is a characteristic of the Yalta-denouncers and Roosevelt-was-a-Communist wing of the most rabid and foolish wing of American conservatism. Surely you know better that they.